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The kids keep coming at Groveport Madison High School. They keep leaving, too.

This year, the school has enrolled three to eight new students a day, Principal Aric Thomas
said. In all, there have been about 180 students in and 309 out. A little more than half of the
school’s students stay put for at least two years.

“We’ve come to grips that this is the way for us, for better and worse,” Thomas said. “We have
to find ways to make it work for students.”

Groveport Madison and a few other small suburban Columbus school districts — Hamilton,
Reynoldsburg and Whitehall — have more students in some grades moving in and out of their schools
than Columbus does. The state’s largest school district isn’t alone in grappling with high student
mobility and is actually better off in some regards. That’s a revelation brought to light by the
Ohio Student Mobility Project, a first-of-its-kind statewide study released last week.

But perhaps an even greater takeaway is that those suburban districts, which also serve poor
students, are somehow overcoming problems related to student churn. While Columbus has an overall C
grade on its report card, Hamilton, Groveport, Reynoldsburg and Whitehall all have A’s or B’s.

They’re fighting similar mobility woes. The suburban districts say they’re finding ways to help
children who switch schools often, including changing how courses are offered to make it easier to
stay in a school even if students move outside the district.

“Reynoldsburg is a good example of, ‘Here’s a district that’s high-mobility, high-poverty,
high-minority and high-achieving.’ That’s not a combination we see all the time,” said Mark Real,
the president and CEO of KidsOhio, a Columbus nonprofit organization that studies education issues.
“I think there’s a lot we can learn from them.”

In the 2010-11 school year, no Columbus-area district had more turnover than Hamilton. That
year, 22.2 percent of students “churned,” or came and went. The in-and-out was slightly worse in
elementary- and middle-school grades, and particularly alarming when you consider that Hamilton has
only about 2,200 students in all.

“When you take into account how high our churn percentage is, (it) makes the academic
achievement of our student body that much more impressive,” Hamilton spokesman Vince Payne
said.

In Whitehall, more than 1 in 5 students came or went during the 2010-11 school year.

The same school year in Groveport, 21.9 percent of students in kindergarten through seventh
grade came or went. The mobility research identified where Groveport kids were coming from and
going to. Over two school years ending in 2011, Groveport had exchanged about 1,200 students with
Columbus, 107 with the South-Western district, 87 with Hamilton, 75 with Reynoldsburg and dozens
more with other nearby districts.

Teachers must gauge transfer students’ skills quickly, figuring out what they worked on in their
previous school and getting them caught up in a new class, said Scott Foor, an English teacher at
Groveport Madison High School.

“We may read
Beowulf or
Canterbury Tales, but different schools and different teachers cover different standards,”
he said.

High-school leaders say they made changes to ease kids’ transitions. For example, physical
science is the freshman science course at some high schools; in others, it’s biology. So Groveport
Madison made each a freshman-level class so no one gets locked out.

The school also allows new transfers to take classes online that it doesn’t offer, such as
lower-level math courses.

Reynoldsburg has tried to stabilize its population.

This year, the district opened its doors to students living outside Reynoldsburg; 178 enrolled.
Fifty-two of them are students who moved away but didn’t want to switch schools.

“Our open-enrollment policy has been a way to stabilize the environment for children,”
Superintendent Steve Dackin said. “Kids can’t help it if they have to move. And we want (them) to
stay.”

“This ought to be a call of action, a mobilization for a collection of resources for kids in the
state,” he said.

Experts say the new Common Core curriculum standards also could help districts with high rates
of churn. Because the new standards Ohio adopted are considered more rigorous than the existing
ones, schools that offer lower-level math options probably won’t do so in the future.

With less variation in the difficulty of courses, it could be easier for students to find
similar ones if they switch schools.